


new memories for old faces

by carmellion



Category: Code Geass
Genre: Canon Compliant, Gen, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-23
Updated: 2019-07-23
Packaged: 2020-07-12 00:16:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,319
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19936888
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/carmellion/pseuds/carmellion
Summary: In the years following the war and the death of the Demon Emperor, the world is at peace. Kallen is not.Kallen and Zero, and a reunion long overdue.





	new memories for old faces

Lelouch paid the sacrifice. The world is - more or less - at peace.

Unfortunately, Kallen isn't. At least, not completely. She doesn’t know why. She likes her life now - likes living in a little apartment with her mom, likes going to school now that she can be herself, with her hair spiked up and the key to her Guren swinging from her neck, proudly on display. Life’s settled down into something resembling normalcy, and after everything she’s been through, isn’t that what she always wanted? But she’s restless – feet always tapping, pencil glancing off her desk like a metronome. She doesn't feel right, sitting at her desk so long. She feels like she should be in the cockpit of a Knightmare. 

Kallen graduates Ashford Academy at nineteen with pretty decent grades for someone who spent most of her senior year fighting a war, but she holds her diploma, and can't help but think, _What next?_ She always thought of her future in vague and grand dreams. Liberate her country. Defeat Britannia. But, now, in the aftermath, she doesn’t have a damn clue what she wants. Those years of living for a dream, for a reason, fighting for everything she wanted, having a goal too far to reach… that was what made her feel like she was alive. Always struggling, always having something - an organization, a ruler, an empire - to fight against.

She’s still the ace of the Black Knights - she’ll always be the ace of the Black Knights - but that doesn’t give her much to do, these days. The Black Knights might be a supranational peacekeeping force, but the world doesn’t seem to need a lot of peacekeeping nowadays. And if there are problems, they're not the kind of problems that require her in her Guren.

During the war, she’d always been the queen, the most powerful piece on the board. _We’ll put Kallen and the Guren here, to punch through the front lines. We’re counting on you, Kallen._

Kallen feels unneeded now, and she doesn’t know what to do with that. Or with herself.

\--

When she sees Ohgi-san next, Kallen mentions her restlessness, though she plays it down like it’s a passing condition, like it isn’t itching at her every moment she stands still. Like she doesn't have trouble falling asleep every night, memories of the war playing behind her eyelids, vivid as always. He frowns at her like he sees right through her. “Well… we don’t have enough instructors for new devicers recruits for the Black Knights. If you’d like –”

She leaps into his arms with a “Yes!” and has never been gladder that he knows her as well as he does.

That’s how Kallen ends up at her new job. She’s not stationed at the capital of the UFN, just in the Tokyo branch so she can stay close to her mother. She’s nervous, especially when she sees the hangar full of new recruits. Her students. Most of them are older than she is, too, but they all respect her. Some of them even idolize her. And yeah, sometimes (okay, a lot of times) she gets impatient, but she’s a good teacher and God knows she’s got enough experience for it. Kallen trains recruits for a year and a half before she starts feeling it again. The inability to focus, the thrumming under her skin telling that she should be doing more than this. It’s obvious now that training new recruits and fighting top-ranked opponents in the middle of war are very different things – and even being in a Knightmare cockpit every day doesn’t fill the void, not completely.

She stares up at her bedroom ceiling, still awake past 3am, wishing she could teach in her Guren.

\--

She’s visiting the capital of the United Nations for business, at the home base of the Black Knights on Hourai Island. There aren’t a lot of familiar faces in the hallways – most of her old comrades have settled down and away – but the people manning the base recognize her. Someone even asks for her signature, and bewildered, she gives it. She makes her way to the huge underground hangar where they keep the Knightmares. Every time she visits, it's become a ritual of sorts. The metal of the walkway clangs at her each step as she passes the rows of Glasgows and Burais. Finally, she reaches the innermost part of the hangar, where a line of Knightmares stand, separate from the others.

Kallen slows down as she reaches them and finally comes to a stop as she takes them all in. The first one in the line is Tristan. Looking at it, she thinks about Gino and the last time they sparred. It was a good match. Gino’s not bad – here she hears his voice, plaintive, _Excuse you, I'm definitely better than_ not bad – but she knows if she went at him seriously with her Guren at 100% output, it wouldn’t be much of a contest.

When her eyes pass over Zangetsu, she’s reminded of Toudou-san and imagines what it would be like to spar with him again. There’s fat chance of that happening now. Toudou-san’s much too busy these days to do something as mundane as sparring, and he would disapprove of using these high-spec Knightmares for such frivolous purpose in peace time.

There’s an empty space next to Zangetsu. Here, Kallen smiles, a little bittersweet. When she thinks of some of the great battles she’s had during the war, Xing-ke and his Shen Hu rank high on that list. She’d flown to Beijing three months earlier with other members of the Black Knights to say their farewells, though all throughout the plane ride she found herself wondering exactly what to say. They hadn’t known each other that well, even if they respected each other’s strength. But seeing Li Xing-ke on his hospital bed, pale and thin with his stoic aide Xianglin at his bedside, she felt something inside her wrench. And when he said, “It’s a shame we never had that rematch,” she felt the tears spring up unbidden.

He died a week after that. Last she heard, the Shen Hu is on display in the Vermillion Forbidden City as a monument to Xing-ke.

Beside that empty space is Mordred. According to Gino, Anya’s still working in an orange farm with Jeremiah, somewhere in North America. And then next to Mordred…

Her beloved Guren. She takes a moment to appreciate the familiar sight of it before she reaches out and touches the cool red metal, breathing out. “Hey there,” she whispers. “I missed you.”

It might have been her imagination, but Kallen thinks her Guren looks lonely down here, in the dark. It should be soaring in the skies, a stark contrast of red against sky blue. It should be zipping through the air in barely-there flashes, not sitting here like a prop, stagnant. Her Guren is the last in this long line-up of Knightmare Frames, but looking at them all in a row like this, Kallen knows there's something missing.

The Lancelot Conquista.

It might’ve been fighting for the wrong side, but there was no denying that it had been one of the greatest Knightmare Frames in the world. Kallen briefly wonders if Lloyd and Cecile would ever rebuild it. She shakes her head a little. Even if they did, they wouldn't be able to find a devicer who could pilot it to its fullest potential. She would know. Of the hundreds of recruits that pass through her, none of them have come close to the genius of Kururugi Suzaku.

Suzaku. There's a picture of him on the corkboard in her bedroom, right beside the picture of Lelouch. She catches herself smiling at that picture of Lelouch sometimes, and why not. She'd forgiven him. But when she sees that picture of Suzaku, young and bright and smiling, she remembers the way he’d pet Arthur, the way he rested a hand on Nunnally’s head like a second overprotective brother, the way he’d smiled as he told her, _I think you’re much more charming and lively than you are at school_. Most days, she remembers Suzaku with the fondness and bittersweet feeling of someone long dead.

But that's the thing, isn't it? Unlike Lelouch, Suzaku isn't dead.

The last time she saw him was the last time Empress Nunnally came to Japan, half a year ago. They’d barely said ten words to each other then. He was Zero then. He was always Zero, never Suzaku. Because even after three years, in her mind, a part of her still thinks: _Suzaku's dead. I killed him_.

Being stuck in a cell waiting for her public execution meant there wasn’t much Kallen could do but think. And for those two months, when Kallen wasn’t thinking about the state of the world, or Lelouch, or her mother, brother and her comrades, she was thinking about Suzaku. She doesn’t know how many times she replayed the battle over in her mind. Flying through the air beside Damocles, the both of them so fast they were just blurs of red crossing white. She couldn’t even remember much of that fight. Just the tail end of it – disabling each other’s flight systems, then her right arm losing power and the green glow of his shield fading. Her last desperate attack, which she thought for a second she hadn’t gotten him. His last words: _No, you got me alright, Kallen_. She remembered spots appearing in her vision, how, right before she’d fallen completely unconscious, she’d felt the shock of an explosion somewhere up above.

She doesn’t know how many times she’s stayed up at night, lying on the floor of her cell, rolling the words over in her mind: _I killed Suzaku_. She remembers waking up in Gino's arms, his voice telling her, _You did it, Kallen. You beat him_. She didn't think of it that way. She'd passed out from exhaustion, and if Gino hadn’t been there to catch her, she would’ve plummeted to her death. Her victory over Suzaku brought her no peace, no sense of victory or justice served. She’d lain awake in her cell, trying to reconcile her guilt, angry with him and with herself, grieving him and pretending she wasn't, cursing him for being on the wrong side.

That shouldn't have been. She was Kouzuki Kallen, ace of the Black Knights. She’d killed hundreds, maybe even thousands of people during the course of the war. Her Knightmare’s primary weapon, the Radiant Wave Surger, made her opponents unable to eject and roasted them to death in their cockpits. She was a killer. One more death shouldn't have bothered her. Shouldn't have haunted her.

But it did, and for two months all she had was her anger and shame and regret. Until that fateful day.

Herself, tied up on the float, paraded down the street awaiting her death. Lelouch up on that throne, and then, the miracle. Zero atop of the pavement. She was shocked at first, head whirling between the two of them, but when she saw Zero dodge Knightmares rounds with nearly inhuman speed and grace, she knew. And when she saw Lelouch lift a bloody hand to that helmet, like a tender caress, she was certain.

She hadn't killed him. Suzaku was alive. Suzaku had killed Lelouch, and as the people screamed and chanted Zero's name, she couldn't stop crying as she knew that he couldn't, wouldn't, be Suzaku again. That that was Zero up there, the world's Zero, for always and forever.

\--

One day, she arrives at work to find the whole base in a flurry of activity. She catches one of her students speeding down the hall and stops him, asking what the commotion was all about. “You’ll see,” the man says, before he’s off again. “What is that supposed to mean?” she calls after him, but he spirits away and she’s left alone in the hall feeling annoyed. She doesn’t have to wait long before she finds out what he means. Because the moment she enters the hangar for Knightmare training, she sees that her students aren’t lined up with their Frames like they’re supposed to, but clustered in a circle around one solitary figure.

Kallen freezes where she’s standing the moment she recognizes who it is.

“Zero,” she says, voice loud enough to cut though her students' chatter. “What are you doing here?” He turns to her, and like the last time she saw him, Kallen is struck by the fact that she can tell, at a glance, how this Zero doesn't look quite as she expects him to. The cape covers a lot, but there's no hiding those broad shoulders, or how rest of his outfit is snug against a muscled frame. He cuts an intimidating figure like that, far removed from that of a slim eighteen year-old who avoided exercise above all. “Kallen,” he says, and the mask does something to distort his voice so it sounds closer to the way Lelouch's had. She should be used to it, but even after all these years, she finds herself frowning. “I heard you were a teacher here. I hope you don’t mind if I stay and watch.” She stares at him, but of course the mask is impenetrable, and nothing in his body language gives anything away. Her students can only take the silence for so long before they jump to reassure him and say _no, of course we’d love to have you!_ And then they all turn to Kallen, as if daring her to disagree.

Kallen sighs. “Fine, stay,” she says, and feels a vein in her forehead twitch as her students erupt in cheers.

The lesson is a disaster. Her students are all over the place trying to one up the other to impress him, and his presence makes her feel self-conscious and on-edge, which just makes her snap at her students all the more. By the end of the day, no one is in a good mood. Maybe Zero is. Hell if she knows – maybe he got some entertainment out of that whole trainwreck.

“You’re a good teacher,” he says, once the students have all left.

“Shut up,” Kallen snarls at him.

“I mean it,” Zero replies. “You taught them well.”

She doesn’t know how to reply to that, so she switches gears and asks the first thing that popped in her head the moment she saw him in this hangar: “What are you even doing here?”

“I've finished my business in Japan, but the Empress ordered me to stay longer. She said that I needed to... to take a break.”

Kallen crosses her arms. “Okay. So why come _here_?”

He doesn’t answer, not for a long time, and she’s about to give up when he rests a gloved hand on the nearest Burai and says, “I didn't know where to go. But I think… I wanted to be near a Knightmare again.”

There's something about the way he says it, that wistfulness in his voice, how lost it sounds – that makes something in her blurt, “Get in, then. Let’s spar.”

“What?” He sounds genuinely thrown.

“Are you fine with just watching? Don't you want to get in a Knightmare again?”

“I -”

“Come on, let's fight,” Kallen says. Now that the thought is in her head, she can't stop thinking about it. All these months of training new recruits gave her a sense of fulfilment, but it had been so long, so long, since she sparred against anyone close to her level. She starts jogging back to her own Knightmare, and doesn't even think when she calls out, “Come on, Suzaku.”

There's a choked noise behind her, and she stops in her tracks, feeling cold. It’s the first time she’s actually acknowledged out loud that she knows who he is. That she's called him by name.

“Suzaku Kururugi is dead,” he says, voice devoid of any emotion. “He died at the Battle of Mt. Fuji.”

She bites back an annoyed, _No he isn't,_ because well, wasn't she the one who knew before anyone else, that he was Zero? Wasn't she the one who proclaimed, for all her comrades to hear, that that was Zero up there on that dais? She'd respected that, all of these years. Never calling him by who he was. Never crossing that line.

But that was then, when he was the hero the whole world needed to be. This is now, and it's only the two of them, and still he insists. It makes her angrier, somehow.

“Just get in the Knightmare,” she spits out, before she turns back to her Knightmare. She climbs onto the lift, gets in the cockpit. By the time she's settled, she hears the sound of the engine powering up, the light of the Burai in front of her flickering on. _Good,_ she thinks with that same anger.

They start out slow so he can get used to the controls, she giving him instructions through a private line, but even then, it’s painfully obvious that he’s out of practice. She doesn’t go easy on him though, and it’s just like him to adapt faster under pressure. Before she knows it, he’s pushing back and dodging all her attacks with that infuriating speed of his. It’s not the same without the Guren and the Lancelot, of course, but Kallen thinks this is the closest she’s ever going to get to that rematch she’s always wanted.

It’s over too quickly. In the end, Kallen ‘wins’, if you can call it that. She manages to pin his Frame under hers, with her gun pointed to the head of his unit, but he’d destroyed her left arm in the process. It doesn’t really feel like the match is over, but they can’t really do more – can’t get serious in this cramped space, in these old ground units, and hell if it’s frustrating. But even through that frustration she feels relief. That felt good, Kallen thinks. Therapeutic, and all that.

Kallen gets out of the stuffy cockpit, breathing in great gulps of air. She hangs onto the lift and swings back down onto the floor of the hanger. But when Zero gets out, the sound of his panting is obvious even through the helmet. No wonder. It doesn't seem all that well-ventilated. “Take it off,” she says. When he looks over at her, she gestures to his helmet. And when he hesitates: “No one will come in here, if that's what you're worried about.” She waits, and then adds: “It's not like I don't know what you look like.”

After another moment’s hesitation, his gloved hands come up to the helmet, and there's a soft hiss as it unlocks. He takes off the helmet with one hand, balancing it on his hip, and then looks up. 

She was wrong. She hadn’t known what he would look like. Despite herself, Kallen stares. Yeah, it’s Suzaku – but she’d known what eighteen year-old Suzaku looked like. Not the 21 year old him. His hair is a bit longer, unkempt, strands of brown plastered to his forehead from the sweat. His face has matured, looking sharper, leaving behind the last bit of trace of 'teenager' that had lingered on his eighteen year old features. But more than that, he looks... tired. Withdrawn. Eyes sunken, cheeks hollowed, pale. It reminds her of how Xing-ke had looked – the kind of exhaustion that came from dying a slow death. “You-” she finally says. “You look like shit.”

He just shrugs one shoulder, and she’s almost about to ask _Why do you look like this_ , when the answer comes to her on its own. As Zero, Suzaku is a tool, a symbol for peace, not a man. When Kallen thinks about it, she supposes she should have expected that he would do this to himself. But seeing that pale skin, the bags under his eyes, makes that familiar anger spark. Wasn’t that what she always found so infuriating about him? Kururugi Suzaku, the eternal martyr. Even in death he still has to be so goddamn self-sacrificing. “Has anyone else ever seen you with that off?”

“Nunnally," he says. Ah, there it is. The sound of Suzaku's naked voice. It's deeper than she remembered it, a little hoarser around the edges. 

Kallen nods. “Ah. That explains the vacation.” She snorts. “Well. I hope you can relax, and take care of yourself. Don't make her worry.”

His voice is still carefully neutral when he says, “I’m not supposed to take care of myself.”

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

Suzaku takes his time to answer, and when he does, he speaks smoothly, like the words are practiced. “’This is a punishment for you as well. You will no longer live as Kururugi Suzaku. You will sacrifice all your personal happiness for the world, eternally.’” He looks at her with those dead green eyes. “I told him I accepted that Geass.”

 _What the hell, Lelouch_ , she thinks. And of course, it was just like Suzaku to take it to that degree. He really hadn’t changed, with that stupid way he was always trying to atone for something. It reminds her of something, of confronting a Refrain-carrying Lelouch, his fingers under her chin, his lips so close she could almost taste them, that perhaps she did taste them, a little – and screaming at him, at Zero, to keep up the lie to the very end. But this is a different Zero, and a different time. She had told Lelouch he carried the responsibility of showing them a dream. Well, wasn’t the dream (more or less) achieved now? The world is at peace. Why couldn't he be? “You idiot.” Kallen shakes her head. “And you took that to heart? You always were a masochistic bastard.”

“This is what I have to do,” and there it is, finally, something more than just that bland tone. He sounds almost defensive.

“I didn’t say it wasn’t. But you’re not infallible, Suzaku.” She rubs a hand against the back of her neck, trying to distract herself from thinking too long on the fact that she’s giving Suzaku of all people a pep talk. “At this rate, it won't be long before you either snap or have a meltdown.”

He says nothing.

“I don't think that that's what Lelouch would have wanted.”

“No,” he says at last.

Well. At least he wasn’t completely hopeless. Silence settles again. When it becomes clear that Suzaku isn't going to break it, Kallen coughs. “So, uh, how long are you in Japan?” she asks.

“A couple of months.”

Her eyes widen. “That long?”

“The Empress insisted.”

A few months, huh. “If you ever need to, you know, talk to anyone…” she offers, trying to sound nonchalant about it. “I’m usually around here. And I don’t have much of a life outside of my job anyway, so… ” she gestures awkwardly, trailing off. Kallen finally makes herself look him in the eye, but she immediately regrets it when she sees how flabbergasted he is. She blushes, feeling self-conscious. What was his problem? Should she retract the offer?

“That's...That's not necessary,” he says at last.

She can't help but feel a sting at the rejection, and then promptly scolds herself for the reaction. There's no reason to be hurt. And she wasn't. She was just annoyed that she had wasted energy on, on concern. “Fine then. Forget I offered.”

Suzaku opens his mouth, about to speak, before he closes it again. His eyes meet hers, before he jerks them away. Kallen frowns. It's the most emotion she's seen from him all afternoon. At the sight of that, she feels the spark of anger and hurt inside her die down. _You're not eighteen anymore_ , she reminds herself. Y _ou're a teacher. You can be an adult about this._ She crosses her arms and makes her voice level. “Don't talk then. Come here and spar with me.” She sees him jerk in surprise at the offer. Kallen waits. She can practically see him teetering on the edge of a decision, and decides on one more push. “I need the practice. You're the only one around who can even hope to match me." She looks him straight in the eye, even though he won't quite meet her gaze. "You always have been."

Finally, Suzaku meets her eyes again. He smiles and it’s a strange one, small and stretched strangely, like he's not used to it. But at least it’s there. “Alright. I'll... I'll come again. Thank you.”

“Yeah, whatever,” she says, tone casual, even as she fought the urge to smile. Stretching out a hand in friendship to Kururugi Suzaku – her eighteen year old self would have been horrified. Well, she’s older now, and wiser (maybe?) and the world’s a different place, so it’s fine. “You should come back and observe a lesson again, too. I swear they're not usually that bad.”

Suzaku nods, still with that faint smile on his face. “Thank you, Kallen,” he says again.

The sincerity in his voice and in his gaze is a little too much for her right now, so she forces her eyes up, rolls them. “You're such a sap, Suzaku, I swear to God. Now get back in the Knightmare and try not to get your ass kicked again.”

\--

Later, as she lies down on her bed, staring at her bedroom ceiling, the old memory surfaces back to mind. The words that had echoed in her head for years, _You got me alright, Kallen_ , the choked gasp of a man who felt the impact of Knightmare arm crashing into his own unit, trapped in a cockpit that might as well have been a ticking bomb. Suzaku's last words to her as himself.

She takes a deep breath, lets the sound of his voice today - _Thank you, Kallen_ \- replace that old memory, and finally falls asleep.

**Author's Note:**

> comments and kudos are always lovely and appreciated!


End file.
